Why do I have a feeling that they are good at doing it, but have a poor understanding of why or how it actually works?
I have actually heard the asian math systems are VERY memorization dependent, which is a HORRIBLE way to learn math for practical use. I have no way of knowing how true that is though.
Actually I know for a fact they are very good at it.
I don’t mean in ability or creativity to solve problems using the given theorems/rules in Calculus.
Really? You really do? You mean about the same amount of emphasis that is put on learning Spanish?..
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Advanced math is useful for those who don’t want to be stuck in menial positions. Basic math is good for those who want to get by on it. For those of us who want to earn a little more doing more work, advanced math is beneficial and necessary. I rather earning 70k a year and doing statistics and calc than earning 40k cashiering or something less demanding on the academia scale.
Know you nothing of statistics, finance, accounting, econ, physics, geo sciences, chemistry, teaching, research, aeronautics, engineering, INDIA, and like the rest of the modern world’s developments? I can tell you for a fact that econometrics (which uses statistics and calc) is one of the reasons my resume looks MUCH nicer.
Speech… Communication… If you haven’t learned how to communicate cordially and effectively by the age of 21…
I know that I never paid attention in ANY of my communications classes and I do just fine when communicating my wants, needs, and thoughts on subjects.
I think you have this wrong… Nobody emphasizes geometry to the line cook. No one forces calculus down a hotel managers throat. Advanced math is emphasized for those who want to achieve higher career goals than just making ends meet. Advanced math is for those who want to research and make changes through government, science and technology.
No one’s neglecting communication. It’s just not something that you should HAVE to teach…
Not if the next Unreal Engine has anything to say about it. 
it’s the educational system with poor teachers. i remember failing algebra because the bitch in a wheelchair teaching me had arthritis and she was complaining each fucking day. her teaching was to read the fucking book. i did but i didn’t get it and failed her exams. bad, bad, bad.
unreal 4 should be exciting. I’ve used unity, unreal 2, unreal 2.5, and unreal 3 in the last year, so I’ll have lots to compare it to and judge it! I like a lot of the changes they have though.
You know go here and learn FUCKERS
The best thing IT IS FUCKING FREE. If you have kids send them to this now
are you kidding most nerds have no social skills whatsoever. just go to a fighting game tournament and see how they interact with females. social intelligence is a completely different skillset from analytical intelligence. i’d have to give the advantage to social intelligence. steve jobs, not the best engineer, but had tons of charisma that he built an entire empire based on a cult of personality.
I tutored in Marshall, TX and wow the quality was quite poor. I also would like to point out that mathematics cannot be learned by rote learning. It is learned by critical thinking/analysis/scientific analysis… whatever you want to call it.
I have found mathematics to be very interesting especially in partial differential equations and other physically applied mathematics and also advanced linear algebra.
BTW if you want to obtain your MBA from you know a university that isn’t University of Phoenix for example you need to take the GMAT and guess what. No calculators allowed
One of our calc teachers made the mistake of telling a bunch of programmers “you can use a calculator on my tests because no calculator can help you with my calculus questions!”.
I had a teacher who would go on his famous rant along the lines of “If I can program a computer to do your job what do I need you for? I’ll save the money.”
I graduated from an Electrifcal Engineerign Tech program, and I would also have to say that teaching math is the biggest problem. Throughout high school I had terrible math teachers and took very little interest in math. Hence, I only took the mandatory classes and that was the end of that. Come college, I was in for a big surprise.
I’m not the greatest at math, but I do realize that it is pivotal in a lot of ways. As I advanced further in college, math was my greatest weakness. However, to this day I believe that the material wasn’t hard per say, it’s just not taught properly and the time spent on it isn’t enough. Math is like no other subject. If you do not get it, you don’t have the option of moving on to the next topic and hoping you’ll do better on that. It compounds on what you have learned and you need to have a good understanding of it.
For instance in my program there used to be about five mandatory math classes that you had to take to gradute over a span of three years. By the time I started it had been reduced to three mandatory classes to make room for more “practical courses”. Yet all the same material was there, but you had a lot less time to learn it. Compound that with teachers who are terrible at teaching math(but are really good at understaniding it) and you have a formula for success.:wasted: Learning Fourier Transforms and dealing in the Frequency domain isn’t the most easiest shit when you lack in calculus, and as anybody can tell you the foundation of calculus is algebra(which I regret dearly to this day in not taking alongside with calculus in high school).
We shouldn’t be “dumbing down” any system to cater to the problem, but rather see how we can improve it to be more practical to today’s kids. Clearly academia was different 40 years ago, and the old ways of yesterday just aren’t working for a lot of kids(the statistics prove that).
Enough of a rant though, I just want to share something with you guys next time somebody says math isn’t practical. If anybody here has taken a DSP course(Digitral Signal Processing), you will come to understand how marvelous and complex it is. Yet DSP is applied in everything, from the mobile phone you use to you reading this text on some sort of screen or paper. If there is some sort of analog to digitral conversion or the other way around, DSP had something to do with it. DSP is also at play here:
[media=youtube]cTUOhYcw4ZY[/media]
If you ever get a chance to even take an introductory course in DSP, I would suggest it. Though the material is very difficult(and I did terrible in the class), it does humble you when it comes to the day to day technology you use and how you never think about all the math involved.
I’ll just see myself out with my BFA…
Lets dumb America down some more. When I compare where I was academically when I was thirteen to my kids it scares me. The future looks bleak.
I can understand how it’s important to have some academic emphasis on young people, but I’m going to be blunt, most of the shit in schools was boring as fuck for me and had absolute lack of appeal. Did you guys get off on algebra when you were kids/teens? I didn’t, and I only knew a few that did, and those were over achievers. That’s the problem, when you shove subjects down kids’ throats that is cut and dry what is really being accomplished? My opinion is that they should completely over haul the entire education system and actually have kids absorb it because they want to and not because they have to.
Part of the problem is that instead of teaching kids how to think, we do the exact opposite: we teach then religion and we fill their heads with biased politics.
The problem is you don’t know what you’re going to do when you grow up and it’s going to be hard to play cach up if you don’t learn this stuff when you’re young.